


The Samahl Sulahna: First Collection

by Keturagh



Series: The Samahl Sulahna [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, BDSM, Bratting, Cuddling, Cunnilingus, Dom Solas, Dom/sub, Drunk Sex, Elfroot, Elfroot as a stand-in for earth smokables, F/M, Fluff, Kissing, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Public Masturbation, Public Sex, Rough Sex, Sex, Smut, Solavellan, Sweet Moments, dom!solas, solavellan hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-02-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 03:11:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 12,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9365237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keturagh/pseuds/Keturagh
Summary: Samahl Sulahna: Songs of Laughter, First CollectionShort works chronicling the romance of Solas and Pangara. Their time together is rooted in love, trust, and longing. In their sexual dynamic Pangara plays the role of a rebellious brat, and Solas very much enjoys disciplining and dominating her. The start of their sexual relationship is chronicled in Slip. Indv. chapters rated below.Pieces:Idarling, the green embrace(explicit ~ neck-breaking elfroot-induced cradle position roof sexcapade)IIjump(fluff ~ Solas casting spells ft. Vivienne, Dorian)IIImoral merit(smut ~ dance lesson)IVthe future from a winter moon(fluff ~ Satinalia ft. Dorian)Vthe delicate, unfixed condition of love(fluff ~ swimming ft. Cassandra, Varric)VIslipping into coats(explicit ~ public blowjob)VIIthe set of the table(slice of life ~ alienation ft. Master Dennet)VIIIdeceits(explicit ~ Solas and his own left hand)IXthe sweet, the having(explicit ~ feedbag position)Xplanting(fluff ~ panic attack ft. Cole)XIblood proofs(slice of life ~ mage party ft. Vivienne, Dorian)





	1. darling, the green embrace

**Prompt: Roof: “Darling, I’m pushing the house/into the garden, into the black arms,/the green embrace/of the oaks.”**

\--

She wants to shout something like, “hold me” or “I’m falling,” or possibly “the ground is very far away” but Solas is already holding her and she is not falling and… well, the ground is very far away. But even though when she lets her head fall back she is staring upside down at an eight-foot drop and there’s nothing that would break her fall if he let her go… she does not actually feel afraid.

That’s probably because her body is flooded with too much adrenaline from the - _ah_.

Her fingernails dig into his arms and he makes a muffled sound like heat and butter and he thrusts into her once again.

He has a way of closing his eyes during sex but he must realize, she fights to think through the haze of his cock punching up at the tight core of sensation in her lower gut, he must realize that he’s essentially _holding her over the edge of the roof_ \- her shoulders dig against the gutter; her head can drop fully over the edge and make her neck strain. Both of his arms are cradled beneath her, his elbows crooked around where her hips splay over his lap and his hands, so surprisingly broad, wrap confidently on her torso, his fingers indenting the skin of her stomach, her sides. His touch is weirdly cold, she realizes, and it occurs to her that maybe he’s using magic. And he won’t let her go, she’s sure, and the roof is flat enough that he won’t lose his balance, and then he directs her hips down forcefully, bouncing her, really, on his dick again and again, and it’s _so good_ , and she lets her head drop back over the edge with a moan and a whine for more, which he _obliges_ , saying something she can’t understand in Elvhen. But she gets the gist. He’s using that certain sly tone that makes her want to smack him, and his words are slightly slurred.

She can’t tell if he’s really _really_ far gone on the elfroot or if he’s just so confident that he won’t let her fall that he’s not worried about the edge of the roof and… _full_ , he makes her full with a slow, commanding thrust this time followed by a wild burst of plunging. (She thinks of how he slams his staff into the earth, how he twists its weight above his head, how he strikes out with veilfist and how the muscles in his arms - the arms secure around her now - coil when he fights and that cool _ferocity_ in him when he kills.) But what started as a very discreet climb up here to toke and meet in the Fade has turned into a potentially neck-breaking sex adventure and she really wants to be able to care more about her life right now than she does.

Then there’s the loamy buzz of the root spreading through her whole body mixing with the thrill of him sliding between her legs and she tries, again, to feel scared. But he has her, he’s got her, he’s holding her and hammering into her and she trusts him, Creators help her, not to drop her off of this fucking roof or, even though that would make a better story, fuck her right off of it.

So she groans, gives in. Hisses at him for more and then surrenders, lets her head drop back over the gutter and rides her whole body shaking as he jounces her on his lap. She unhooks her nails from his skin, drops her arms over her head, reaching back into the night. Arches her back and breathes in the night and really makes him work to hold onto her, which he does, adjusting to grip her tighter, plunging into her more keenly and apparently taking her abandon as an invitation. Which it is. And she feels her mind float free of her trembling, bouncing body in a fuzzy halo of satisfaction and bright, floating alertness as she gazes upside-down at the edge of the woods in the pale moonlight. She leans into the sensation of teetering just on the edge of falling into the night - like falling out of the top of her head, pouring onto the earth and spreading between the roots of the trees and tracing all of the earth and all of the night and all of the shadows between flowers and vines. Becoming a thing that’s dark and green and sweating; and this is where her mind is when he shudders, murmurs something else that she doesn’t know if she can’t understand because he speaks more elvhen than her or because she’s abandoned, forgotten all the languages of men; he pours into her, grinds her hips down hard onto his cock and holds just so while her mind carries her free: the edge of the woods blur and shake and the shadows reach out to catch her when she falls.


	2. jump

**Prompt: “Piece human, piece hornet, the fury/of both, astonishing abs all over it.”**

\--

She’s never really noticed his hands before.

Well… no, that’s not true.

She’s never noticed his hands while he’s _casting_ before.

So the flourishes, the twitching, the way his palms flip the staff overhead, the way he twists his grip around from front to back and the releases the sparks of magic alongside Dorian’s own manipulation of the Fade…

He straightens, turns back to the Tevinter mage, and his hands move with him as he gestures back at where his magic has dispersed. He is effusive about something. Dorian is agitated. They’re both far enough away that she doesn’t have to hear the details, thank the bald balls of the Creators. But it’s unusual enough to hear him trying to speak over someone else that this must be important or… well… some relative measure of important.

“Isn’t that right, darling?” Viv asks from the couches.

“Don’t try and give answers to these fine people that they know I can’t speak for, Enchanter,” she says over her shoulder, all good-humored Inquisitor. The nobles chuckle and Vivienne plays right off of it.

She leans against the cold stone of the balcony. Returns her attention to Solas who is now…

She breathes in, sharply.

Well. They’re both shucking their coats and undershirts and… what… what is happening.

Dorian apparently is meant to go first, and his bare chest actually glimmers in the sunlight which, she considers, might be an effect of the cream he insisted she use in the Western Approach. He wields the staff over his shoulders, moving with a circular motion, flings the staff overhead in a vicious, strong strike to the ground. Looks over at Solas. Spreads a hand as if to say, with absolute authority, “See?”

Solas snorts. Un-crosses his arms -

“Pangara, darling, please correct the viscount -”

\- spreads his stance -

“… some trifle of a Dalish custom he seems to have turned round…”

his _hands_ they _flex_ , and the staff whirls across the breadth of his shoulders.

His abs…

The way his abs cut down into his pelvis…

“… forgive my mistaking the heathens’ ways! I’ve no sense of mind for barbarism, no taste for the stuff myself…”

He shifts his weight all up, left hand balling around some force of air and Fade energy and his face is lit by the sparks and then he turns his grasp and spit-fast whips his hand back down, ending with a decidedly graceful caress of the space above his knee as the magical energy flows from his palm.

“Uhm.” Pangara says.

She’s not… she’s not sure why there had to be partial nudity involved in this particular argument. But Solas and Dorian are back to pinching the air in gestures of frustration and gesticulating wildly at their own staffs, then at each other’s staffs, then miming their respective castings once again.

“… Darling? Do please give us all an excuse for merriment; I’m certain that we would all be glad for the chance to see the good viscount reduced to ashes in a rift.”

“What?” Pangara rips her gaze from the training yard and realizes that she’s supposed to be participating in an argument. Or more accurately, given the ice in Vivienne’s eyes, she’s supposed to be delivering some scathing message of authority and grace to the thin-lipped nobles.

As it is, she finds her gaze drawn inexplicably back down to where Solas and Dorian are arguing. And that’s when she sees it - only so briefly, but clear and uncharacteristically bold, when Solas casts a look up to her on the balcony, raises a brow, settles his hands at his hips, and smirks.

She does cast a spell then: raises a barrier with a muttered curse and gets her feet under her on the railing and the gasps chorus behind her and Dorian looks up over his shoulder and appears to say the same thing that Vivienne says in her most plaintive, irritated voice when she calls after her, _“Really?"_


	3. moral merit

**Prompt: Ballroom: “if an unfortunate man, strong in soul, is indignant rather than despondent or dejected over his fate and wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it and from neither inclination nor fear but from duty - then his maxim has moral merit.” (Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals)**

\--

This was not a place he was meant to be, nor a hand he was meant to hold.

This was not herb-scented hair that should brush his cheek. And these, not velvets that should brush against his chest.

For, being as it was, the moon this bright; the air a swamp overhead; the creatures of the ballroom jabbering in the reaches of their masks - this was not a thing that was made for him.

Joy.

Giddy. Brightly lit. And she begged him to let her lead, just to show him what Josephine had made of her in three sessions of desperate footwork on their way to Orlais. She stepped on his foot twice. The first time, she jumped back and nearly hit him in the mouth, and the second time she collapsed entirely into laughter so that he had to catch her as she stumbled, and the wine let him laugh along, snorting at her pantomime of Josephine’s anticipated mortification. The way their Ambassador had visibly choked when the whisper passed around that the Inquisitor was leading the Duchess to the dance floor.

“And did her noble toes suffer?”

“Ha! Not one bit. Maybe,” she bumped her head to his chest, pointed straight down, swaying “you should have smaller feet.”

He took her arms and held them out to either side, leaned her back on her heels, and then led her into a lazy turn. “Truly? I’ll try.”

She laughed. It was not impressive wit but it did not need to be, thank all the sky, for at that moment she was distracted by drink and he drew her close and smoothed her in a rhythm drawn from the ends of his memory across the length of the balcony.

“What song is that?”

“Hm?”

“You were just - it was so soft.” Her head was laid against his chest, were her eyes closed? “But I’ve never heard that one.”

What… what had he hummed? Better to move aside the topic, to - he reached for an evasion, came up with a wry, “Little dancing among the Dalish?”

But then he knew this was not right, because she leaned back and looked up at him. Gave him a look of such bemused shock that he asked, feeling light, wondering if he’d said something else entirely, “What?”

“No. It’s only - did you really never _ris’venahna_ , with everywhere you’ve been?”

Ah. Retreat, his mind warned. You have taken too many cups. He first tried to find a memory of… little dance? from the impressions of this world that had moved within the Fade where Dalish dreamers walked.

No - it was the drink fogging his memory, or it was not something he had seen.

He lifted his arm and let her pass beneath.

“I am not Dalish,” he said, and he let it have a harsh edge, hoping she would move on.

She only shrugged as if this did not have any relevance, for once. “No, but would that matter for _ris’venahna_?”

He was not often ignorant, especially not with her, and it fumbled him. The uncertainty made him feel disoriented from more than just drink, caught between curiosity and betraying some essentially elvhen thing he did not know from this age.

And when he failed to come up with an answer, the wine supplied. He spun her, lent her a lop-sided smile, and asked in a tone of suggestion meant to distract and disarm, 

“Show me?”

Her eyes caught the moonlight and glowed, that spectral green, as she laughed, brows shooting up. “Gladly.”

And as she came around to face him again she reached out with both hands and held his elbows, stopping him, steadying him. She stepped close. Placed one of his hands cupped on her waist. Held his other hand in hers, drawing closer. Their arms pressed together between their bodies, the back of his hand grazing her breast. He felt a sudden lump that he needed to swallow around. And then she was closer still. And she rolled her hips against him, and whispered, “Right foot forward.”

He complied, trying to lead from her words. “Half-step side. Sorry, other side. Feel me do it. Half-step side. Then - like this.” She managed to pull their bodies through a basic step that had more sex than sense hot in the small space left between their hips. But he felt a racing in his heart that was more embarrassment than arousal - _don’t_ , he told himself, firmly, trying to rectify allowing this dance to go on even as he felt her pressing - felt her hips squirm - in his lap -

“You a finer follow than teacher, I’m afraid, ma vhenan,” he stuttered as he pulled away, putting space between them that was entirely pragmatic.

Fiendish. That was the lay of her grin. She let him go, but made it clear she knew why he retreated.

“On the contrary, it seems I am a perfectly serviceable teacher.”

And there it was. The gentle, teasing fun - the softness within her that plucked at him, made him yearn for simpler, kinder truths. It wasn’t much of a goad. But it made him _see_ her. Made him shake his head, made him mirror her grin, made him take her hands and press her close, murmuring in violation of all that was wise, “Oh? And what would you teach me next?”

But though he danced her in her way, though he backed her against the wall and pressed a knee between her legs, though he let her feel what she’d stirred against her thigh; and even as his arm reached under her and lifted her, and while he kissed her furiously, a hand holding her chin, her hips hiking close and her tongue meeting his, the knowledge lingered in the back of his mind.

To approach happiness. To pursue life in this world he had made.

To love.

These were not things that were meant for him.

And yet.

And yet.

She sighed against him.

_It is the wine_ , he thought, coming apart. _It is the wine._


	4. the future from a winter moon

**Prompt: Boardwalk: “Or sing about the golden bird that summoned the future from a winter moon.” (Wax Cross, Tin Can Forest)**

\--

Gold flashes in the corner of her eye. She flinches reflexively, stumbling away from the gleam, and the clown sees this and cavorts back her way. She’s already shaking her head as he sidles up to her shoulder, voicing a theatrical _“Ah, beautiful!”_ The stink of liquor ripples from his mouth and she covers her nose, leaning back.

“So _shy_!” He sings out, his whole body glittering with gilded gleam.

She feels a little sick.

“Come off,” Dorian intervenes with a finality that even the clown can heed. The tumbler bows, grabs his codpiece suggestively in Dorian’s direction, and then cackles away into the night and the press of the crowd. Dorian holds her shoulder, is speaking to her. She struggles to surface from the cloud of combined root and liquor stifling her awareness.

“Thanks. I have no idea why he -” she waves in the direction that the clown emerged from: a brightly-baubled tavern open to the night, the lanterns strung along its windows reflecting in the water below.

“Who can guess why anyone is anywhere doing anything in this mess.” Dorian ducks under her arm and they continue down the boardwalk in southern Val Royeaux, he maneuvering her through the revelry of Satinalia.

“Not enjoying yourself?” She feels like the top of her head is trying to pull away from her ears.

“Not nearly as much as you clearly are, dear thing.”

Her head shakes but then she realizes her eyes are closed.

“No. No, I’m walking.”

He makes a sound of pure exasperation underneath her right arm.

“What you are currently managing hardly qualifies, and I am in a fine position to judge.”

No one recognizes her as they weave around skirts, overlarge masks, and the stalls of costumed vendors hawking sizzling meats and battered berries piked on sticks. It is nice to not be recognized. She does not know why this is happening to her right now, but it is good. It is like she is dreaming. It is like she is not the leader of the Inquisition. It is nice to walk like this and to be following her body from just over her own left shoulder.

After a long time, too long, where she just watches the passing velvet and lace, the glimmering jewels and fascinating, plunging necklines that have usurped those ridiculous collars for this occasion - she thinks to ask, “Where are we going?”

Dorian pulls her out of the path of a back-flipping dragon missing one of his shoes and belching fire.

“I am depositing you with your keeper, and then _I_ am going, alone, to enjoy literally one moment of this mad excuse for a festival.”

“My Keeper?” She laughs, thinking of Deshanna lecturing these shems. Grown Orlesian noblemen sitting cross-legged in the dirt as Deshanna lashes their ears with stories of Falon’Din wandering the edges of the Void, his owls waiting for bad children to show disrespect. Falon’Din would hear the reports from his messengers and would summon the spirits of their great-great-grandparents to admonish them from the Beyond if they did not honor their elders. “They would cry,” she concedes to Dorian, who just looks over at her, snorts, and looks away.

They reach the end of the brightly-lit boardwalk and come to a part of the dock that has few lanterns, few revelers. The crowd has been left behind; few vendors, and unpopular ones, dot this end of Val Royeaux’s dead waters.

Dorian heaves a long-suffering sigh and sits her down on the edge of the dock, her legs dangling over the water glistening under the moons. “This one is yours,” he says, flatly, and then he is gone and she opens her eyes and realizes she had forgotten to open them for a very long time.

Solas looks down at her, one corner of his lips twitching up in the way that they do when he is trying not to smile.

She reaches up. Holds his cheek. “You should let me see,” she says.

He does smile then, but it seems a different sort of amused. He presses a palm to her forehead.

“Of what did you partake?” He says, though he doesn’t seem particularly concerned that she answer. And she does not, closing her eyes again under his warm, broad hand.

“Happy Satinalia,” she answers. “We do not celebrate this shem fuckery.”

He laughs, his breaths catching in that funny little way.

“No?”

“No. But I saw someone give an impoverished child a mooncake, so I guess one good thing came of today.”

“That was you. I was there. Don’t you recall?”

“Oh. No. That was me?” This genuinely disturbs her for a moment - both that she has seen him earlier this night, and that she remembers watching someone else, someone dressed in a simple gown sewn of cotton and fennec fur with a mask of etched moon phases doing something that apparently, she did as well. “Solas, there must be so many mooncakes.”

He only chuckles softly. He is sitting, hands pressed together between his knees, legs hanging off over the water. She has been rotated, it seems, so that she is flat on her back parallel to the edge of the dock. There are boats out on the water, all of them drifting far away from them, closer to Val Royeaux proper.

She turns her head to the side and sees the mask that she remembers from her - dream? No, that was a memory, something she saw someone do - next to her on the boardwalk.

“Oh.”

Something makes a loud, crackling sound in the night. The moons are so bright.

“Why aren’t I cold?”

“Likely the intoxication. Equally likely, the fire sigil you warped down before Dorian helped you sit. I believe your exact words were, ‘Wood is cold, don’t tell me what wood is, I know cold when I see it.’”

She blinks, slowly. Turns her head to look up at him again, meeting his eyes very carefully.

“Solas. Is the dock on fire?”

He answers very seriously. “No, vhenan. The dock is not on fire.”

Uncertain if he is deceiving her or if he is a Desire demon telling her what she wants to hear, she rolls onto all fours and inspects the dock, vigilant, for signs of smoldering.

And then arms are wrapped around her and Solas is pulling her over his lap. She protests, moaning to be released, but he holds her firmly, even bouncing her like an errant child upon his knee. “Hush, da’len,” he soothes, which is outrageous and unacceptable. “Hush.”

The lapping of the water below them crinkles through the night. Peals of laughter reach them softly through the winter air; the lights of the boardwalk string up against the sky over Solas’ shoulder. She watches the costumed figures ghosting about one another, their merriment taking on the eerie echo of halla cavorting between trees, movement like a familiar dance she does not want to recognize here, so far from home. She presses her cheek into the warmth of the pelt he’s slung over one shoulder, the fur tickling up her nose.

“I’m not a child,” she says.

“No.” He agrees, though he continues to hold her. The crackling sound rips out again, the noise much closer this time, and she jumps. “Sorry,” he says, lightly, and holds the pack of cards up where she can see. “Old habit.”

“What were you doing?”

He performs the trick for her while she rests in his arms, holding his hands out side to side and fanning the deck from one hand to the other. He presses a kiss to her forehead. “Don’t tell Blackwall.”

She laughs, shakes her head. “Never.” Then, “Here, let me read you.” And before he can say a word she’s plucked a card from the deck and is holding it up to the moonlight.

“Gold of Angels. We call this one Gilded Death.”

He stiffens beneath her and it occurs to her that he is likely unfamiliar with the game - he has spent so little time among the clans.

“It is a good card,” she says, mollifying. “It is a card of change. Of journeys and new life, reworking and finding paths beyond what a person already knows. It usually means that something is going to change. Something drastic - something will never be the same.” He doesn’t say anything, only his arms wrap around her tighter. She leans into his embrace, arm out and holding the card over the water, letting the goldleaf on the figure’s wings catch the shine of the moons.

Then, impulsively, she flicks the card away. Out into the dark, carried a short way by a breeze over the dead lake. She watches the card flutter, goldleaf shimmering like eyes in the night, and she looks away before it lands upon the water and sinks below the waves.


	5. the delicate, unfixed condition of love

**Prompt: Mountaintop: “and so the delicate, unfixed condition of love, the treacherous body/the unsettling state of creation and how we have damaged - /isn’t one a suitable lens through which to see another:/filter the body, filter the mind, filter the resilient land” (chronic, D.A. Powell, Chronic)**

\--

How perfectly the lake mirrored the sky above. How delicate the unbroken brush of clouds against the mirror-like surface of the water; too cold to keep life? Yet, no - even here, he could feel the stirrings of creatures pressing against the Veil from both sides. The simplest means of survival: desire, fear, but among them all, the strongest, perhaps not surprisingly, rest. An unsullied presence of simple, animal hibernation overtaking the threads of metaphysical energy defining this winter landscape.

And then she came from behind him, passed him, completely naked, holding her breasts in her arms, and all he saw was a flash of the curve of her back sloped down as she hurtled from the shore.

Between her mounting screech and the laughter behind him, he felt the peace of this place flee.

He snorted.

“AhhhHHHH,” she groaned, again, having made the serious miscalculation of pausing halfway through her immersion.

“Just get it over with,” he reasoned, close enough to see the vulgar gesture she flicked his way. He couldn’t help but chuckle, stealing a glance over his shoulder to see that Varric and the others had not seen. Most of them were still doubled-over in laughter, but Cassandra was frozen with her hands over her mouth, mortified. She spread her arms out to him, then to her Inquisitor, looking far more helpless than could possibly be comfortable for a woman well established in both dignity and fortitude.  
He shrugged.

Cassandra’s face dropped further yet; abysmal, clearly already mapping the funeral of her divinity manifest upon this earth.

Pangara writhed in the water, grasped her nose between her fingers, and collapsed into the water fully with an obscene splash of the icy lake. He scrambled up, out of the way of the wave that rocked to shore.

“Chuckles, grab a pint!” Varric called from further up the shore. Solas half-turned with a measure of reluctance from watching where she’d dove and shook his head, giving a disarming smile and a small wave of his hand.

Then she burst back to the surface, gasping, and he heard the Stone child snicker softly as his gaze, entirely by chance, whipped back to where she emerged from the water.

She spat a mouthful of glacial cool and gasped, then gulped again, and he stepped forward, alarmed.

But then she laughed. Held her stomach, the Anchor flickering reflections of nebulous green luminescence off the sunrise-pink surface of the water. And she stumbled, and her feet must have fled from beneath her because she dunked again and the party behind him roared with new laughter, and only when she crawled back to shore did Cassandra rush forward with her cloak and cover the Herald - so newly titled, so newly castled - as she shivered and choked on her own laughter.

“And that’s how - every winter, when the ice first broke, we would summit the hills nearest the - but, _good Creators_ , it was never that _cold_ \- ” she devolved into a shivering mess, unable to speak over Cassandra’s anxious, devoted lashing and her own mirth.

Then she gasped, “Solas, you’re next.”

And he stiffened as the group on the rocks above all turned their eyes to him as one.

“Such a tempting offer,” he measured, sitting back down, slowly, “But it seems I’ve not your courage, Inquisitor.”

“Trying to claim you’ve never _really_ welcomed spring, Solas, not in all your travels…?”

“Not, perhaps, as the Dalish have.”

She ignored his press, as she so often could - he would need to develop a better mechanism for turning her interest - and chose, instead, to pull herself across the rocks to sit beside him.

“Cassandra,” she said, “Asking as the leader of this Inquisition, how important would you say it is for our expert on the Fade to demonstrate some hackneyed Elvhen behavior and cavort among the wonders of the natural world?”

Cassandra, clearly not expecting to be drawn into this, did not grunt in vexation, as he’d expected, or reprimand their leader’s insensibility.

Instead, she pinked, and turned away, and muttered something under her breath that he couldn’t quite pick up, and scrabbled back up the slope to where the main of their party drank and celebrated their arrival to Skyhold and enjoyed the vistas of his long-ago demesne.

And then something that had not happened before, in all their small movements around the corners of each other’s beckoning, happened. Pangara reached out and touched his cheek. And she murmured, just quiet enough for him, only, to hear, “My loss all the more.” And just as quickly she stood again. And he, very carefully, did not look at her as she threw off the cloak and, to the rise of exclamations loud behind them, once more disturbed the surface of the sky.


	6. slipping into coats

**Prompt: Tavern: “This is how I will choose / you: by feeling you / smelling you, by slipping / you into my coat.” (Oranges, Roisin Kelly)**

\--

Theirs was not the sort of arrangement that allowed, when she dropped a crumb of cake into her decolletage, for him to slip his arm around her back and press his mouth upon the subtle rise of her breast and gather the sugar, neglected there, onto his tongue.

His knuckle pressed discreetly to his mouth, as if to force his tongue from darting out to do just that, as she brushed the sweet from her skin, careless. He watched it tumble to the floor.

The brandy in Val Royeaux had not diminished in vapor or taste, and he was pleased with the way this intoxication made it easier for him to set aside his other cares and focus. On her.

On only her. Refusing to sing, even when bribed with sweets, stealing those sweets in any case and then singing just as easily once the rest of their company had taken up the tune. Pangara’s true anxieties were of a more subtler variety, really, and her reticence only an eye for the balance of the camaraderie among this troop.

_This clan_ , he corrected, considering, and it was not so surprising that she should mark the pulse of this company with such particular finesse of judgement. Her gentle manipulations were plain to him, of course; it was as if watching an Orlesian conductor before strings, only its own quality of entertainment, though she would bridle to be compared to any measure of the ‘golden empire.’ And he would not blame her.

She was not minding him. Though he sat at her side, and occasionally her knee brushed against his by accident, her attention was on their assembled allies: Sera, groaning at yet another bard composing a Red Jenny ballad that made no mention of the sins of noblemen; Varric, holding court before a group of mercenaries out of Kirkwall with tales entirely preposterous; Dorian, sitting before the fire and complaining, loudly, of a chill that only he seemed capable of perceiving.

She was looking at him. Her knee pressed against his.

He looked away and sipped from his glass.

Theirs was not an arrangement that made it anything less than lewd for him to duck, covertly, to raise the scent of her skin, her hair, into his lungs.

And so when she shivered, he was surprised to find his mouth pressed against the back of her neck.

He jerked away, stood, and left the bench, left their empty cups parading down the honey-gold wood of the bar, left her with her back turned to him and her grip, tight, on the edge of the table.

She found him standing in the alley in the brisk winter night. She moved him against the wall. She held his mouth with hers; she rearranged the world completely.

He felt her remaking him, within it.

He shivered beneath her touch.

She murmured, released him. He felt as if he might fall forward, might fall into the sky; she slipped a warmth about his shoulders: a pelt, he realized. She tied it across his shoulders by the leather straps. She pressed back against him. He became everything hers beneath her warmth, and her soft desire, and her seedling claim upon the scorched trellis of his fate.

And she eased him to the ground.

He realized he’d been drinking like the world was going to end.

And she knelt between his hips, and asked into his ear, “Yes?” and he nodded, feverish, yes, yes, like this was his last night, like the cold over the world was rising up to claim him, too. And she took him, warmed him, so obscenely engorged, into her _mouth_ , and his head whipped back against the stone of the tavern walls, cracking there with a burst of mixed agony and ecstasy, and he groaned to be within her. The air was so cold on his exposed skin, but he buried his face deep against the fur she’d laid about his shoulders and a warmth all within his gut spread through his body; and she swallowed around him, and knocked his knee aside with her elbow, and he saw at once not only how he had misjudged her aims this night, but how she gloated her triumph for him to enjoy.

And he did, thrusting up between her lips - no care for the mindful eyes of Orlesian gossips who doubtless marked their pleasure; let them titter over the barbaric knife-ears rutting in the alley - she made him depraved with the way she _sucked_. The way she turned aside the fabric of the world and unknit the places that did not humor her.

So he made himself into a pattern she could wreck.

And she plucked those parts of him aside, one by one, until she was at the core of him; and he gasped with his fingers threading through her hair; and there was a scandalized gasp from a window above; and he burst within her - and she swallowed around him. And he spent within her.

And then he dragged her up. Kissed her swollen lips, and then ducked low - bit the skin above her breast, and, as she moaned, sought for a vestige of sugar there.


	7. the set of the table

**Prompt: Forest: “I carve a set of dishes. I set the table. There is no table.” (The Dishes Age, Zachary Schomburg, Scary, No Scary)**

\--

“I don’t know much anything about horses,” she had said to Dennet when he’d arrived at this small city growing in the mountains and she had seen, clouding his bright eyes, twisting in his weathered cheeks, the same fumbling, awkward slowness she felt in herself, every damn day.

At Haven there had been wilderness close upon the walls. The people had been quiet, even the ground close and warm and something familiar in the way the earth sprouted between the snows. Fear, yes. Determination in the soldier’s stances, and the unfamiliar chanting around the Chantry doors. But ultimately the quiet danger of the woods had held that mountain town in arm. Tremors of a feeling like something ancient and eldritch still haunting the air. Wind lonely in the night. Wolves threatening the dark. The stars clear around the cut of the Breach. And all men muttering their tales over fires, songs low and breathed in smoke. Like home.

Vivienne asked about her people’s arts. She’d somehow recognized her vallaslin and guessed, correctly, that Pangara knew the crafts of weaving and knits. Dorian pressed her for the intricacies of Elvhen spellwork - she highly suspected Solas had deferred the Tevene’s attentions her way, and this felt simultaneously like a flattery she had not earned and then, when Dorian’s curiosity proved insatiable, like a slightly underhanded trick. She could not talk about the energies of the Fade, manipulating the Veil, and the “theories of relative barrier dispelling under duress of ice encasement” with anything near his level of eloquence or understanding. He did not mean to make her feel so lost. And yet.

And so, the old wood of the stable walls. The way the splinters gripped her hair. Webs lit in the pale cast of sunset, new and shining in the crooks of the stable doors. The softness of a muzzle lipping her palm to take the root she held; warm snorting. “Flatten your fingers,” he’d said, slowly guiding her hand. “You’ll get bit.”

A halla would never bite like that; she hadn’t known.

They spoke together in the dusk. She could escape just as twilight brought the main force to the dining hall. She would take a satchel of nuts and roots and other scraps on her way through the kitchens, Chef gruff over the stoves, waving her on with a look that said both, “No, I won’t send them your way,” and “What, my food not good enough?” While the busy halls of the grand castle filled and filled, she went to Dennet and she said, “I don’t know much anything about horses,” and the first time, he had not smiled at her, but the corner of his mouth had lifted, and the deep lines weathered around his eyes like a sun’s vallaslin had shown her he was glad to have her there, feeling small and tired and like the world had gotten too big too fast, the two of them finding each other just the same, just the same.

“All I ever wanted was a little slice of peace,” he sighed to her, one day.

She was silent, because peace was a thing she had never felt she’d had, or ever missed so much.

But he didn’t mind her silence. And this was the real reprieve.

When he showed her how to care for the hart it was like a place inside the middle of her heart opened up and swallowed the animal whole and she had never seen such kind eyes.

Or such a _nasty fucking temper_.

“Stand _up_ ,” the Master of Steeds shouted, and, pained from her last throw, she hoisted her ass out of the saddle and looked up to the canopy of trees above, praying for whatever guidance could possibly be bestowed on a halla-rider straining her legs and yanking the reins, _too tight_ -

She flew back, and the air was a black torment of whipping visions, and then she was looking up at Solas pulling the reins of his steed - _how did he always look so composed when riding? Where had he learned and how much time had_ he _spent with his ass on the ground?_ \- dismounting, coming to her, worried. She only shook her head and covered her eyes, and it was Dennet’s chuckle, low and always the same, that let her collect her frustration and twist it into humor and toss a pinecone, half-heartedly, at the hart’s retreating hindquarters. She didn’t intend to hit it and did not. Dennet rode past them both, trotting to catch the creature’s reins.

Solas’ hand was steady on her back as he tipped her forward. “You are not injured, Inquisitor?” he asked, so tender; and she did not know what to think of him. He had followed them into the woods to collect more plants for his pigments, he’d said. But he had not harvested anything but her own sorry rear, thrown to the ground again and again, since they’d arrived.

“Only my pride,” she’d breathed past the pain in her empty lungs. So rote, too tired and embarrassed to think of anything better. Still, his lips had twitched.

She and Dennet stood shoulder to shoulder (really, shoulder to elbow), and observed the sword-slain creature newly delivered unto this citadel.

“I’ll feed it…?” Dennet had said, slowly. And she had given him a look that was, in all ways, a helpless washing of her hands of all shem magicks and shem gift-giving.

“Sounds… good?” She had ventured.

And then, after another moment of considering silence, they had both, first softly, and then reaching out to support the other’s arms, laughed. And bent over their knees. And when the creature tossed its head and whinnied at them, furious, they had laughed _harder_ ; together, the world in front of them strange and huge and pestilent. Moving faster than a world should move. And, still chuckling, they watched the stars appear through the darkening eve. They waited for the castle to fill with silence. Waited for the earth to gentle like they knew land could, when rolled beneath a sky so full of its own night.

“Guess you’ll have learned a thing or two,” he’d said. Meaning she could take his lessons back to her clan. Teach them, if she wanted. But she’d just shook her head and held the bay’s black muzzle in her palms, and fed it roots off the table of her hand; said, “I don’t know much anything,” just revising her sentiment to this, after all this time. And he’d meant it when he’d nodded slow and answered, “Me neither, halla-rider. Me neither.” And she knew. And the castle was quiet, for once, and they’d both leaned against the old wood barn, and, together, wished for a feeling like home.


	8. deceits

**Prompt: Castle Ramparts: “Doubtless, then, I exist, since I am deceived” (Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations)**

\--

Had he, in how many years, in how many decades, in how many _centuries_ , experienced pain like this sidling between his ears - knocking against the inside of his head, first one side, then the other? Had he ever been assaulted by such a cacophony of noise?

Yes, his memory reasoned. You have fought wars. You have slipped among battlefields, you have heard the fell chorus of dying men.

_No_ , his present mind groaned. _Nothing has ever been this loud._

People, everywhere. Cullen barked at young soldiers in the yard. Masked merchants flooded in through the gates, petitioning for one of the central stands for their wares. Whinnies from the stables echoed through the wooden door and down the hallway to his study. And when he had lifted his hand to mark the sky, the paint finally mixed just right, the brush pliant and his vision for the mural clear in his mind, the sudden ignition of the Smoldering Core she had brought to the researchers above had filled the rotunda with raging fire and a blast of sound that had set the birds screeching, and Dorian had yelled something about _the books_ , and his hand had slipped and he’d streaked a stain of ocher through the mountaintops, and he had snarled a curse and thrown down the paints and stalked from the tower. Now he stood above this infuriating press of people - fighting, bartering - human voices and the sounds of swords everywhere.

He leaned on his elbows, head pounding. Then the ache redoubled, and he tried pressing his forehead to the cool stones of the rampart, feet shifting, knees bending right and left, trying to rediscover balance and an ease for the ache in his skull.

When was the last moment he had slept in peace?

The couch in the rotunda had been a familiar enough place to rest when Skyhold quieted for the night.

But lately, there had been no quiet. At any hour. In any corner of the stronghold. For weeks.

The cool of the stones did nothing to ease the rippling pain cascading from his forehead down to the base of his skull.

He looked up and saw her then. The Master of Horses was at Pangara’s side. Both of them were stroking the neck of an overlarge dun he’d yet to greet, but it was she he watched as she slid her palm down the creature’s flank, and said something to Master Dennet, and Dennet nodded, and for all the noise and chaos and movement around them he perceived her - clear - a steadiness bright in her spirit that anchored him like a root in cool soil.

She bent and chose a carrot from the pail.

Compassion - Cole - at his side. “Dreamer disturbed, desires -”

“Cole, no,” Solas turned and moved up to the highest level of the ramparts, twisting the Veil before and behind his step. Compassion did not follow.

Desires.

Shame twisted through him.

Every day. And, though he had resolved to ignore the urges, yes… every night. Desires. He had encouraged her in Haven, after all, just to let her know he saw her. Appreciated her… Had expected absolutely no reciprocation.

Had been sorely, if delightfully, mistaken.

He had known no peace from her since, and she did not know how it tormented him.

What had begun as a wandering impulse in an easy dream had brought him, hurtling, into the… suddenly very apparent reality of this world.

And unless he was prepared to debase himself, sully the ethical underpinnings of his presence in her life and choose to debase her, too, to take her, to ravish the soft press of her body beneath his own…. He knew he would have no relief.

The clanging was quieter from so much further below.

He paced down the ruin of this section of the wall. Finally, a place he could rest. A moment of relative quiet, the drums of voices at the very least distant, if not silent.

He turned his face up to a brace of cold wind slamming down the mountainside.

The pounding in his head had receded, somewhat.

Sleep, his body insisted, finally removed from the crowd, and he slid down the sandy mandolin cracks of the wall.

He closed his eyes.

_She bent and chose a carrot from the -_

He wrenched up. His eyes flew open.

Stupefied, irritated, groggy, his body aching.

… Cock rising, filling, pressing under his breeches…

Solas put his face in both hands, moaned, and then, like an animal, _and it had been so many nights, facedown on the couch, trying to put it from his mind, trying to find the reprieve of dreams, and he was so tired, and he just wanted to be allowed to sleep,_ he placed one palm flat against the rise in the soft leathers at his crotch, and rubbed.

The vision rose back to his mind immediately.

But it was not her bent over in the stableyard.

It was her in her brown leggings. Bending over the table in his study. Her hips pressed against the wood. Her fingers traced the words in one of his books - a book on the vallaslin written by some Orlesian scholar. No doubt her attention had been drawn by the explicit and slightly offensive depiction of the clan celebrating the mark-day on the open page. And he had stepped closer, to hear her sounding out the letters.

It was a stolen moment, one he had not been meant to witness.

She missed an inflection here or there. And then he realized that she missed a letter. Noticed she missed more. She spoke the garbled words from what she recognized, then repeated the phrase she’d managed to parse and filled in gaps with what she thought might fit, based on her knowledge of the spoken language.

He had tried to turn, to preserve her privacy. But she had heard him.

And she had only turned and locked her gaze to him, looked at him. Waited for him to explain himself.

She had been, it became apparent, willing to wait until the walls around them rotted back into the earth.

“I have disturbed you, Inquisitor,” he’d said, softly.

“Yes,” she had agreed, simply. She had looked back to the book, then looked back up at him. “Yes, you have.”

“Apologies. I will come back at a more convenient time,” he’d said, but she’d come towards him and she’d put the book in his hands, and she’d opened it back to that page, and she had looked up at him, and she had asked, “Is this what you think of us?,” and he had thought she’d be embarrassed, but he was the one suddenly hot with defensive reproach and -

He pulled his hand away from his lap. _What was he thinking?_ He could not do this to her. Could not take a memory of her fire and pick through it for the curve of her ass bent over a table.

_No_ , he repeated firmly to himself, _No, he could not._

“No,” he had said, “No I do not.”

And she had quirked a brow up at him, and looked back down at the picture, and then looked back up at him. And the way she looked at him: amused, that gentle way her anger lurked, absorbing hints of what could cut deepest - he saw her study him in this way. Although he’d smoothed his expression, pure reflex, still he was not certain if she’d managed to see to some vulnerability within him when her next action had been, bewilderingly, to just look down at his hands and pull the cuffs of his sweater down his wrists. Right, then left.

“Good,” she’d said, and had turned and climbed the steps. He’d stood with the book in his hands. His heart pounding. A mix of irritation and confusion souring his thoughts. He’d heard her open and close the door to De Fer’s landing.

Solas pressed his head back against the ramparts. Now he felt both the shame of almost giving in to the sordid reduction of her person to a raunchy representation, and the shame of how thinking about her looking up at him, thinking about her brushing his wrists, remembering her stepping close as she’d placed the book with that illustration in his hands - of how these memories had thickened his length, had built the press against his breeches to an urgent, gross pressure.

His headache was back.

He realized his jaw was clenched tight. He pinched the bridge of his nose, futilely, and tried to discipline his mind to stillness, his body to restraint.

_Restraint_ , rose the thought, and he pictured, absolutely against his better judgement and in a cascade of unremitting debauchery, all the ways he could restrain her, and he groaned, and his hand fell back to his crotch, and he rubbed himself over his clothes. And he refused, firmly, to allow his moral mind to protest as the heat haloed in his heart, letting his eyes glaze over as the words she’d spoken rearranged in his mind into a flirtation, _“Is this what you think of me?”_ “No.” _“Good.”_ What had she meant, when she’d just adjusted his sleeves? _Good._ The word played riotous in his thoughts, echoing louder and louder, _“Good. Good. Good.”_ And the tone shifted, still her voice but speaking in ways he’d never heard from her before but that he wanted to hear, wanted to hear so badly. He thrust his hand beneath the band of his breeches and spat into his left palm, then brought his fist around his cock, moistening from tip to half, twisting his wrist. He spat again into his hand, slicked his length full, and then with eyes pressed shut so that only the thought of her - yes, bent over the table, he was no better than that, he was no better than reducing her to that - filled his mind. And it was a frenzied freedom of relief his wretched mind took liberties with, so that in moments it wasn’t just her bent over the table, it was her leggings pulled under the curve of her ass, his hands cupping the softness of her full in his palms, her legs spreading, and wet and splayed she glanced back over her shoulder and pierced him with that sly look, and she spat at him through bared teeth, _“Good.”_

Groans cut through his labored breathing. He pulled - pulled - pulled… and quickly scrambled to his knees to direct his spill onto the ramparts, first shuddering through the full-body stiffness, his spend shooting up and out and slapping shamefully to the stone of his ancient fortress. Then he guided the rest of his release from the hot tightness beneath his cock and tremored, his other wrist clenched between his teeth to stifle his sounds.

When he had finished, he stared at the evidence of his debased indulgence. Sounds from the yard far down the wall came back to his hearing. He hoped that no one had heard him, listened. It seemed not - had he made much noise? He adjusted his breeches. Resolved to forget he had ever pictured her like that, that he had ever twisted the truth of her like that in his mind.

He settled back against the wall again, loose, breathing deeply, staring in disgust at the evidence of what he’d just done.

The ramparts were cool against the back of his head.

His headache had lifted.

He closed his eyes. Refused to think of her. 

Refused to think of anything. 

Finally, slept.


	9. the sweet, the having

**Prompt: Armory: “The wet, the swollen, the light, the seeing. / The picking, the washing, the cutting, the quartering. / The sweet, the having.” (Peach, Catie Rosemurgy, The Stranger Manual)**

\--

She opens her eyes.

He is below her, he is beneath her, and part of him - Lips? Fingers? Tongue? - pulls strange and bright and like soft fabric against her cleft and she tries not to think, as if desperately blocking out her thoughts will somehow make him continue. She does not want him to pull back, as he has so often before. She does not want to see his thoughts working behind his eyes. She does not want him to straighten, proper, distant, and stiffly leave her on the cold stone floor.

He _moans_ between her thighs. This is a sound she has not heard from him before. She achieves that blankness of mind she craves - replaying this sound of him when he brings his lips flush to her cunt over and over in her mind. And she is only brought back to herself when heat pulses in a fine corkscrew up her stomach and through her heart.

When his hands press against her, they leave a sticky trail of peach-juice up her thighs. She strokes one of his knuckles, stained with paint and the juice of their shared indulgence - the peach she had secreted down here. She closes her eyes again, head tilting back. Determined not to wonder at this sudden abandon, this fury of hunger within him that has lowered her to the floor in the wash of sun pale through the window, that has her soft cries gasping off the walls of the armory.

He is testing paths within her that are, unfortunately, not all gratifying. She is quiet for many minutes, listening to his breaths mount and shift; listening to herself - the places of herself that she has often moved into frenzied, pulsing heat - slip and squelch beneath his eager, plying touch. He ruts his wanderings against her. Finally, he finds a rhythm, a pressure in his tongue, that is good, and she watches time scatter in the lint-dust shifting lazily in the air.

She is too afraid to whisper, “More.” And then this disturbs her. She is suddenly unsure. If she speaks, if she moves, he might stop. He might go, and she will have broken whatever brought him to her, into her. Pressed his lips to the peach in her hand. Brought his lips to hers. Her hand on his cheekbone - so sharp. She touched the scar above his eye. She feels like she is in a Keeper’s story, trapped in the paths Beyond, lured by wisps and hunted by wolves. If she speaks she will break whatever spell weaves his tongue insatiable at her folds, whatever strokes his fingers up within her - _deep_ , and he’s found something inside her that shivers to be known.

But a wrong move from her, and this might end. Is it, then… a dream? She presses her eyes shut tight against the thought, even as he shifts between her legs and one of his ears grazes her inner thigh and she wants to comb her fingers over his head and behind his neck and _thrust_. Is this room, this moment, this man - all phantom? Born out of night and Fade and memories of gold light winking off the swords and metal helms, arranged so neatly on the shelves? And, if she realizes, if she becomes aware -

No, she is firm. No. Not yet.

He has some way of knowing that this is good, that he has struck within her. Some way of twisting the air around her to feel lighter, so that she is buoyed in repose. He becomes less capable, less elegant as her wetness becomes a messy, slippery stream that he struggles to find traction within. He pulls back - _no_ \- and touches the back of his wrist to his mouth. And his eyes when they look down at her are heavy. When he breathes in, his whole upper body tilts back, he raises the fingers that are smeared with peach juice and her own spend to his mouth, sucking with what she could mistake for rapture as he burrows one hand under her thigh. His touch is surprisingly rough when he grasps her beneath her rear and drags her, one-handed, closer to him across the stones. She shivers to have a new cold stone under her back.  
He is settled beneath her legs, now. She looks at him; looks down at the bulge in his lap. When her gaze flicks up again to see, quickly, if he means to join with her, he is looking away, his hands grazing idly over her thighs but his gaze questing for something within the room.

“Solas…?” She asks, a little afraid that this is the end. That by speaking, she’ll wake herself up in her bed in Skyhold.

But he only glances down at her, smile lazy - and satisfaction dispelling, for once, the tight reminders of loneliness from his eyes.

“May I lift you?” He asks, and after a moment she nods, putting out her arms. He lifts her and carries her to the bench set in the middle of the armory. Places her down gently.

He kneels before her, places a supportive hand at her back. He wraps first her left, then her right leg up over his shoulders. Her ankles cross behind his back.

“Stunning,” he observes, his breath hot and close to her sex, and then he sucks her into his mouth - her clit, and the mound around it, taking it all in an ambitious mouthful. He groans again, rumbling around her. And this sound is so aggressive for him - so unambiguous and _sensual_. Her whole body clenches and trembles in response.

The wooden bench clacks as an uneven leg drums the stone floor. Now he is not slow, or gentle, or thoughtful: he feasts like an animal at the kill. Muzzles against her, bites her clit between his teeth, licks out urgently. He revisits the pressures and circling patterns that make her whimper and whine, and then, finally, because even if it wakes her up she cannot keep from crying out, make her moan his name.

“ _Solas_ ,” she invokes, trying to convince herself that this could be real. That the sugary spill of fruit drying on her thighs, that the heat he tightens within her, that the swollen cock she reaches down and lightly strokes, could all be hot and true and hers in the waking realm. And then she groans, eyes squeezed shut, because she feels how he has taken his cock in hand and is palming himself while he holds her hips to his face, fucking her voraciously with his mouth as he strokes his erection. He tips his hips forward at her questing touch, and she comes from both the realization of how wild he’s become in the _wanting_ of her, and in the suddenly-avid press of his mouth on her sex: her crest is violent and bucking, his mouth sweeping hard on her sex, her release spiralling up from her core and rushing to her head and blacking out the world behind a wax helm of metamorphoses and night sky.

Her feet are cold.

She opens her eyes.


	10. planting

**Prompt: Snowbank: “The world became a bag of seeds. This is no one’s fault. Nothing is anyone’s fault, which is something we must remember. The world is just a bag of seeds, and there is nowhere for the seeds to be planted.” (The Difference Between Sadness and Suffering, Zachary Schomburg, Fjords)**

\--

The first time he holds her, she is knee-deep in the snow and the harsh stones rise above them to either side through the tumbling snow.

“I am worthless,” he is certain he hears her say, but it is muffled, spoken into his coat.

“Herald?” He says, shaking her shoulders gently.

Now he kneels beside her, again, in the snow, and stays Cole from reaching down to embrace her.

“Thank you, Cole, but she does not want to be touched.”

“She does,” the spirit whispers, insistent. “Yearning, a flight of fluttering thoughts, too many, too far away, she begs, all full of yesterdays, someone: please hold her to the earth.”

Solas looks back down at their Inquisitor. Considers.

He nods, slowly. “But be wary of what she actually asks for.”

Cole kneels down. He places his arms around her shaking shoulders - very light, for a hug. Just a small pressure - simple warmth.

As before, her arms strike out against the touch.

Her silent, rocking panic crescendos to a wail. It is not like a child’s cry, it is not like an animal’s screech. It is the sound of an Elvhen spirit rending, and it tears his heart apart.

“Cole, enough!” Solas moves to draw the spirit gently back from the embrace. “What she needs and what she accepts may be different things. She may not have the strength to take what you would give her.”

Cole stumbles back, blinking wide, clearly overwhelmed by what he reads within the woman whose body is shaking in the snow. His hands rise to his face. “I can help. I can untwist the - the thing inside her.”

She has quieted again, left to cradle herself. For a moment, Solas is tempted to empower Cole to move within her. Not as Compassion once could have, as a spirit pure of form. But in this strange new state of being, still Cole is not powerless to know what she needs. He could ease her spirit, Solas knows.

“She has said no, Cole,” he says quietly, and folds his hands behind his back, and his toes melt into the snow. He can feel the cold even through the spellwork on his wraps; this journey has been long, everyone’s strength failing and their endurance wearing thin. The battles bloody and the foes unnerving. He should have measured this strain on her spirit. They should not have pressed on; had she insisted out of a lack of self-awareness? Stubbornness?

Cole sits beside him. Then, possibly reading something from her, he stands and retreats three paces away. Then he sits again.

Solas stands and waits. He wants to learn what he might say, to soothe her safely through her tremors. He wants to learn how he may touch her - not to stop her, only to anchor her, so that she may remember her body’s strength.

He wants to be a presence that tells her she is safe.

This is what he has always known best: the balance of a person’s spirit held within their flesh - the shape of it manifesting, pure, within the Fade. He is well-positioned to calm her spirit and he just wants to be useful to her, he explains to himself.

He wants nothing else but to be useful.

He wants to learn how to care for her only to keep her safe. This leader - their figurehead. Elvhen, and in pain.

She gropes at her own neck. She whispers something; Solas looks to Cole, then takes a step forward to better hear her.

“I don’t have a heartbeat,” she says again, and he hears the fear sharp in her voice.

He pauses.

Considers.

She digs her fingers into her neck, rapid, frantic.

He does not know how to not touch her and yet touch her. He does not know what to say to help her have faith in her body’s form. But he wants to learn. So he observes how she soothes herself. He notes the places she puts pressure on her arms, her head, her legs. He studies the shape of her breathing. He memorizes the small little phrases he can barely hear her whisper to herself. And when she is still, and her gaze comes back into focus, and he sees her face twist from desperate, wild fear to poignant, and needless, embarrassment, he is there with a small, accepting smile. With gentle eyes and his hand offered out. He stands beside her, not yet knowing how to hold her up - but ready to help her rise.


	11. blood proofs

**Prompt: Museum: “my blood approves,/and kisses are a better fate/than wisdom” (VII e.e. cummings)**

\--

Vivienne had made it clear, in a number of different ways, why the _apostate_ should be left at Skyhold.

And as their voices raised in the atrium - his cynical, bitter and cruel, and hers vicious and imperious, threaded with poison, Pangara found herself wishing, however begrudgingly, that she had left both of them behind.

Not because Solas did not have the right to be here. And Vivienne’s thoughts on the artifact could be crucial.

But the two mages could not be reconciled to one another’s presence.

Traveling to the Orlesian museum had been increasingly trying. Now that they were here and had the opportunity to review the artifact, this bickering was, frankly, a waste of everyone’s fucking time.

Pangara’s grip tightened on her staff. Her reflexive method of snapping an argument to a close with a flare of magic would never work in this company. She had realized early on in their journeys together that she would need to be able to out-speak them. She would have to out-debate them before they could start to mount a defense, and position her arguments to win in the first volley, before they could rally and silence her: Vivienne with polite affection, Solas with distant irritation.

At the moment, Dorian was the only member of their party preserving the Inquisition’s face in front of the scholars who had been studying the artifact. The few nobles scattered about seemed most thrilled to see Vivienne getting a rise out of the Inquisition’s apostate. The scholars, on the other hand, were a confused cluster of red-masked men and women, all too nervous to speak directly to a mage from Tevinter. They shifted their feet and tried to point out features of the artifact that Dorian had already noted and dismissed as irrelevant.

The consultation of the Inquisition’s mages had been an unprecedented extension of trust. They had more or less beseeched, "please do not destory too many old pots with your army," but also Josephine thought it was likely that the museum wanted to form some sort of benefactor's alliance with the Inquisition. The museum had requested this conference of the most highly-positioned magic-users in Ferelden and Orlais to explore the nature of an artifact recently unearthed in the Arbor Wilds.

When they'd been brought into the room that housed this newest acquisition, the Inquisitor, the _Herald of Andraste_ , had been brought forward first. Pangara had given half a glance to the great round thing, seen it was decidedly neither Dalish nor affected in the slightest by her mark, and had shrugged at the assembled company.

“I defer to the experts,” she'd said.

A mistake.

“I only care to point out, my dear, that it is not remarkable. Not considering your predisposition to see every discipline of magic as deriving from the conscious manipulation of dreams - and the demons that lurk within. Naturally, you incorrectly perceive a connection here, where it is clearly most inappropriate.”

“Ah, yes. The Fade is of no consequence to one who fiddles with the primordial energies like a child copying words from rote. _First_ Enchanter, there is nothing in magic that is not dream.”

“A response I would expect from one who has so narrowly focused his learning on the subject. Scoff, yet you would be disgraced by the ingenuity at the most limited of salons. Tell me, in your isolation, how often did spirits challenge your preconceptions about the nature of magic and the Fade?”

“More often than you would care to admit or come to know -”

Pangara pinched the bridge of her nose and looked back to Dorian. He was elbows-deep in the device, two scholars fluttering nervously on either side of where he knelt. It seemed like they were imploring him to be careful.

Dorian saw her look and only shrugged, rolled his eyes, and made a gesture within the device that both caused its core to glow vibrantly green and alarmed the scholars no end.

Pangara looked around at the growing crowd. Solas and Vivienne, increasingly haughty and posturing, either did not notice human nobles edging closer to their show. Or, perhaps, they felt bolder with the audience.

Josephine… would not like this. Not one bit.

“Remarkable,” she heard a nasally voice carry to her under another of Solas' biting remarks, and Vivienne's answering laugh. “A knife-ear so _passionate_ about something he clearly knows _nothing_ about. Ripe for abomination, seems to me! A wonder he's not yet been slaughtered by demons, or at least put down for all our sakes!”

Appreciative chortles blossomed up around this idea, that the _knife-ear_ should be _slaughtered_ , and Pangara snapped, felt her vision go dark, and she choked as she jerked forward, hard footfalls bringing her to Solas, the Anchor spitting.

He was mid-sentence; she took his hand, blood in her ears and her eyes fixed on the floor. She walked past him, wrenching at his arm when he resisted. She had no words to speak past the lump of impotent, enraged loathing in her throat. He wasn't moving. She pulled him, again, and then finally looked back and let him see all of her hurt. His stubborn snarl faded to vague guilt; he swallowed whatever argument he’d so urgently needed to fling at Vivienne next, and he followed her.

She couldn't even look at Vivienne as she wrenched him away.

“Do you know what the artifact is?” she asked him bluntly. They’d woven through side rooms of masks, spears, and suits of armor and found a hall that was quiet and untraveled, the walls devoted to what appeared to be paintings of soldiers tending their wounded along the Chantry’s Exalted Marches.

Solas made a frustrated noise, releasing himself from her grasp. He adjusted the cuffs of his sleeves. “I can postulate," he started, "based on similar findings in the Fade -”

“No. You don’t.” She spoke over him, spreading her hands side to side. “You don’t _know._ You don’t know what it is or what it does. That’s it. You can _guess,_ but you don’t know.”

His lip curled and his hands clenched and twitched and he struggled, obviously, to keep from saying something that even he, incensed and at least partially humiliated, knew was too cruel to say to her.

She appreciated his restraint, but was equal parts furious. With him. With Vivienne. With herself… for not laying that Orlesian nugbrother out in the cinders of his own skin.  


“The last thing I need is for you... When we’re only _here_ for one damned thing - " she failed to speak, her hands empty. She hated all Orlais and she was unbalanced and hadn’t formed an argument that would bring him to her side. She hadn’t realized how deeply the nobleman’s words had sunk into her. She felt scared, even though she knew both of them could fight their way out of a mob if they needed to. She felt protective. And helpless. Adrenaline made her shaky. Having nowhere to go, the fight inside of her pricked her eyes with tears. _This is not what I wanted_ , she thought, as she turned away from him and demanded her eyes to dry.

He was strangely silent behind her. She wondered, for a moment, if he’d gone.

“I heard it too,” he said, softly.

She suddenly did not want to talk about this. Wanted to not have to talk about this ever again.

“Can we just focus, so we can leave?" She tried to make her tone lighter, tried to put on the easygoing mask again. It wouldn't fit. "If you’d just _try_ and work with Vivienne…” He stood behind her, patient. “And," she added, hard, all her frustration coming through, "you can’t speak that way to her in front of her people. She has to save face. She has to play their Game, she has to defend herself.” 

Solas came and folded his hands behind his back beside her. Then he reached out, and placed a hand, steady, on her shoulder.

She looked up at him.

“I know," he admitted gently. "You are right. It does our cause no favors to bicker in the open.”

She knew he did not speak of the Inquisition.

They were both quiet.

“Don’t make me scared for you,” she asked.

“I cannot promise that,” he answered. She looked up at him, numb, and she had always known that this was true. Even if he were silent and meek among the shems, still, the abuses and the threats - however veiled - would never truly cease. He was a man who stood so strong, and so tall, dignified and certain. It made him a bigger, better target.

Still, she’d asked as she’d asked her father, her uncle, and her mother when the rare opportunity for barter had opened up with a shemlen homestead. “Don’t give me any reasons to worry,” she'd say, reflexive, watching them leave. An easy thing to say, even after she’d gotten old enough to realize the futility of it. She knew there wasn’t anything she or her family could do, no behavior or change of mood, that would protect them from the shems.

But part of her still thought that if she didn’t at least ask, warn them, and plead with them to be safe - then whatever happened would be, somehow, her fault.

“Try and be safer,” she amended.

After a moment’s hesitation, where she watched something strange pass behind his eyes, he nodded. “I can try.”

She wanted, when she drew up against him, when she wrapped her arms around him, when she buried her face against the fur across his chest, to have a spirit that was calm. She wanted to be able to make peaceful the still-shaking fears and rages that conjured a thousand stories of retribution and public humiliation in her mind.

She wanted to not have to think about this anymore. To just have him, _him_. Without this constant crowd of watchful shemlen, friend and foe alike. It was too much. His arms wrapped around her, pulled her close and tight.

“Ir abelas,” he murmured, voice low. For only her.

He pulled away at the sound of passing Orlesians, nobles chattering behind masks.

He looked down at her. She reached up and touched his lip. He seemed surprised, at first, but then she stepped forward and brought her lips up, hovering close to his, and she felt his body shift to face and accept her, wanting, not meaning to show how much he welcomed this.

"Pangara, I..."

She kissed him. He moved and drew her closer, as if holding her were sacred, responding immediately and intensely.

Dorian's call for both of them was shouted, nervously, from the direction of the atrium.

Solas' face hovered over hers, one moment longer. His breath moved on her skin. His blue eyes read into hers, wintry and fine, the threading of his irises woven with purplish grey. Then he closed his eyes, drew back. “Perhaps Dorian has unlocked the secret of the thing,” he said roughly.

“Perhaps," she allowed. She smiled, squeezing his hand. "And Dorian and Vivienne, working _together_ , could use their Fade expert to figure out who made the thing. Then you can all receive the praises of the shems and we can _go_.”

He conceded with a rueful half-smile, and he held her hand as they jogged back towards the sounds of confused shouting, through all the galleries of things the shems studied, past all the human things they sheltered.


End file.
